A few quarters ago, I'd have called our trajectory "steady materials science." After the Q1'26 print, I'll call it the purity premium compounding. Here's how I'm framing the next two quarters to my team.
Two assumptions sit underneath this forecast. First, advanced node demand keeps pulling on our specialty gases, CMP slurries, and filtration — the AI/HPC build cycle isn't a fad for us, it's a shift in what fabs demand from a materials supplier, and our mix is improving faster than the headline. Second, our Q1'26 gross margin step-up to roughly 47% isn't a one-off. We reaped pricing discipline and richer advanced-packaging content, and I'm modeling only modest normalization from there — call it 45–46% — because the product mix doesn't reverse quickly once it tilts.
On revenue, I'm pencilling in a low-single-digit sequential climb through Q2 and Q3, tracking continued capacity ramps at key customers. Net income keeps rising because operating leverage does the heavy lifting: even with R&D and opex reinvestment, more high-margin content per wafer converts into cleaner flow-through.
Top risk? Customer concentration in the leading logic foundries. When that cohort catches a cold, we feel it — memory softness has been a partial offset for the past couple of years, and if logic inventories stretch, that cushion disappears fast. I'll keep watching that pull-forward signal closely.